Rather than being compelled to watch Jones-Sonnen, we simply can't look away

I guess it’s fitting that Chael Sonnen should get his shot at UFC light-heavyweight champion Jon Jones via reality TV.

The whole thing is just contrived enough to feel appropriate because where else do you get to become famous for portraying some carefully crafted version of yourself for an audience that likes to think it’s in on the joke? What other format so aggrandizes the person who’s willing to do or say anything just to stay on TV?

It all makes so much sense, especially when you consider the dismal current state of “The Ultimate Fighter” franchise. Whether because of the coaches, the time slot or just the stale sameness of it all, people are losing interest. Ratings plummet. Executives frown. Something’s got to give.

So what do you do? If you’re UFC President Dana White, you call in the cavalry. You get Sonnen in there opposite his enemy of the month, who just happens to be yet another UFC champion, and suddenly you have all the manufactured conflict of a “Real Housewives” episode, only with slightly less makeup.

Will it revive interest in the “TUF” franchise? Sure, temporarily. Will it result in a big pay-per-view bout, assuming Sonnen and Jones can both make it through the filming and the training that stands between them and an April 27 title fight without getting injured, arrested, deported or disemboweled? Probably. Is any of that reason enough to justify turning the light-heavyweight title into a reality TV prop? No way.

It’s savvy, in its own way. Maybe even diabolically brilliant. It gives fans what they claim to want, or at least what White and the UFC keep saying they want. Apparently there are great mobs of fight fans roaming the streets and demanding that Jones defend his 205-pound title against a man who hasn’t won a single UFC fight in that division. I haven’t actually seen or heard of those mobs, but White keeps telling us they exist while also impressing upon us the need to placate them. Those people, I guess they just hate seeing title shots reserved for those who have earned them.

If you really want to, you can convince yourself that a Jones vs. Sonnen title fight makes sense. After all, wasn’t that the UFC’s original plan to save UFC 151? Isn’t that the fight people keep saying Jones should have taken back in September?

Of course that ignores the fact that, even then, it wasn’t anybody’s first choice. It was an arrangement of convenience, one that Sonnen was qualified for only because he was willing to do it on such short notice. Now we have months and months to plan Jones’ next defense, especially while we wait for his arm to heal up from his most recent experience fighting a middleweight who hadn’t earned a crack at the belt. It seems like, with all that time to think and with important light-heavyweight bouts like Dan Henderson vs. Lyoto Machida and “Shogun” Rua vs. Alexander Gustafsson on the horizon, we could probably come up with someone better than the guy who was only just barely suitable as a last-minute replacement.

And please, if you’re going to be one of those people who claims any fight that puts butts in seats and adds pay-per-view buys to cable bills is, by virtue of that accomplishment alone, a good idea, then you’d better be ready to carry that viewpoint to its logical conclusion. You’d better be all for the New Year’s Eve in Tokyo freak-show approach that gives Bob Sapp a paycheck just for falling down on the same fight card that includes dudes in masks fighting juiced-up science experiments. You’d better be willing to apply the same logic to anything that the masses will pay for – pro wrestling, Katy Perry concerts, ventriloquist acts – and conclude that sheer financial viability is the only measure of quality that counts.

Because if you aren’t willing to go that far? If you acknowledge that some things are dumb or senseless or patronizingly contrived no matter how many people are willing to pay for them? Well then brother, you’ve just pulled the first thread that will unravel this whole ugly Christmas sweater into a ball of tangled yarn. From there you quickly conclude that ratings boosts alone are not reason to enough to treat a guy like Sonnen as if he is the No. 1 contender in a division in which he has yet to successfully compete. And then, once you find yourself standing in that lonely cul-de-sac, you’ll have to admit that this move by the UFC has nothing to do with sports or competition or any of the other things that make professional cage-fighting appealing to reasonable, responsible adults like ourselves. Instead, it’s just about easy money and cheap entertainment. It’s about giving us something we can’t look away from rather than something we feel genuinely compelled to watch.

I get that there’s a place for what Sonnen does. The guy is funny and clever and smart. He’s also a pretty good fighter, at least as a middleweight, though we have no idea whether he can beat even a middle-of-the-pack light heavyweight yet. What’s so baffling is that the UFC isn’t interested in finding out, and it assumes we won’t care. It thinks we’ll be so glad to see Sonnen on TV that we’ll get swept up in his antics and his insults and his insta-feud with Jones, and then by the time April rolls around we’ll have forgotten that there is absolutely no reason why he should be getting a light-heavyweight title shot in any universe in which legitimate 205-pounders such as Henderson and Gustafsson are still drawing breath.

In other words, the UFC is hoping we’re at least a little bit dumb, and that we’re very easily distracted by tough talk and shiny objects – like championship belts, for instance. Those make for such useful props on reality TV shows. You don’t even have to explain the importance of a big hunk of leather and gold. Fight fans already know what it means to own or fight for one, or at least they thought they did. If they aren’t rethinking it now, maybe they ought to be.

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